Sunday, December 07, 2014

Jerry Pournelle talks about a past predictive program that was terminated because it worked:

I have a number of letters from people who try to account for differences in mean IQ among races – a phenomenon found and confirmed so often that it must be assumed to be true – by various factors, the most common of which is culture. A number of competent differential psychologists who would have wished to find that all those differences can be truly accounted for by cultural (and thus changeable) factors have devoted a great deal of effort to trying to prove that, and to eliminate all cultural factors from IQ tests, but they have not been able to do so....

There is no single item in any IQ test that identifies the race of
the person taking that test. Any such item, if there ever were any, has
long since been eliminated. You may look at IQ tests until you are blue
in the face and you won’t find the “racial code” items, because they are
not there. A lot of very smart people have worked hard to see to that. But IQ tests do predict academic success. And the University of
Washington developed a Grade Prediction Program that did much more. I
worked on it as a graduate student. The experiment was paid for by Navy
Research.

Basically, for all incoming freshmen, we took measures of almost
anything you can think of that might affect academic grades, and
recorded the grades those students achieved in four years of instruction
at the University of Washington. We recorded high school class rank,
and grades in high school subject areas. We gave batteries of tests to
the incoming freshmen. We took ratings and estimates from counselors
(which were not easy to get because counselors are not accustomed to
making numerical estimates, and sure enough, they weren’t much use in
the final predictions). We even threw in height and weight. We did not
record race, religion, national origin, or socio-economic status.

All this stuff went into a huge matrix, one line of a couple of dozen
predictors for each student. Then over time we built another matrix,
one line of grade results for each person. This whole thing then went
into a huge program to find the correlation of each item in the
predictors with each item in the results. This would be a number from 0
to 0.99; actually I think the highest predictor item was about 0.8,
which was IQ. Many of the predictors were near enough to zero that it
could reasonably be concluded that they could be eliminated. There were
one or two predictors that correlated highly with some fields of study
and not at all with others; the formula was adjusted for that so these
predictors were only used in prediction of relevant academic areas.

And lo! After a few years of taking results and honing the prediction
equations, every incoming freshman was given a grade prediction for a
number of academic area. Be a math major and you will be an A student,
but you will flunk out of biology. Actually, of course, that would be a
rare result: people who were predicted to be A students in any area were
likely to have higher predictions for other areas. An A prediction in
engineering would very likely to be accompanied by an A prediction as an
education major. Of course an prediction of an A average in Education
was not necessarily accompanied by the prediction of an A in anything
else.

The program was successful, but it is no longer used, because the
average grades predicted for Black and Hispanic students was lower than
the average grades predicted for White students. There was no single
item in any test that identified the race of the student, but those who
set out to prove this thesis managed to find that out.

The beauty of science is that it eventually calls one's assumptions and ideologies to account. At this point, one can only laugh at those who claim that human intelligence doesn't exist, that IQ doesn't measure anything, that neither IQ nor intelligence has no any link to race, and so forth. IQ is a very powerful predictive model of human intelligence, in fact, it is one of the more reliable predictive models that we have. It may not be fine-grained, it may not account for the full range of human accomplishment, and it may not be deterministic, but so what?

A metric's failure to be absolutely perfect in every regard does not render it useless. In fact, conservatives should take note that one of the most useful things about IQ is that it completely undermines the entire equalitarian program and renders it intellectually hors de combat.

If, in the interest of maintaining your belief in unicorns, leprechauns, and human equality, you are still trying to claim that whites are intellectually identical to Asians are intellectually the same as Africans, or asserting that it makes no difference whether someone scores +2SD or -2SD on an IQ test, you are worse than an idiot. You are being intentionally and willfully dishonest with yourself; you are deceiving yourself. And self-deceit is not a sound foundation from which to determine the truth about anything.

105 Comments:

It has been known for a long time that IQ (usually measured by proxies like the SAT/ACT) predicts outcomes even better than socioeconomic status....and is the only measure that does so. Egalitarianism is a fraud, and has been known to be a fraud since ancient times....

The test and good grades. Both these educational tools have something in common: enfranchisement and ass kissing.

Let's take another example: formal essay scoring. People who score well on formal essay assesments, we may predict, get better grades in the long term. What are the chances you learn how to write an essay if your teacher sucks or assumes it's not important for you to learn?

It has been known for a long time that IQ (usually measured by proxies like the SAT/ACT) predicts outcomes even better than socioeconomic status.

Yes, because your SES is more a prediction of your parent's IQ (because when your IQ is typically measured, your SES is your parent's SES_ and regression towards the mean means that you likely got a hand of cards that is closer to the mean than your parents.

So, your SES when your IQ was measured might have been lower than average, but there is a good chance that your performance will be better than that.

A man decides early in life, whether to align himself with truth, or to align himself with power The two are often, but not always, in opposition to each other.

Alt-Right writers have opted for the former. Establishment writers, mainly the latter. Power wins in the short-term, sometimes spectacularly But in the long term, truth--and directly or indirectly those aligned with it--always wins.

because the average grades predicted for Black and Hispanic students was lower than the average grades predicted for White students.

Vox, do you know if they separated race from socio economic status? Because it could just be that average grades predicted for poor people are lower tgan the average grades predicted for ric people, and that hispanics and blacks are overrepresented among poor while whites were overepresented among rich people. And of course there is a correlation between wealth and IQ.

Also, kind of off topic, doesn anyone know of a programm that can do this:

This whole thing then went into a huge program to find the correlation of each item in the predictors with each item in the results. This would be a number from 0 to 0.99

I could really use something like this for a work thing right now. Would be very thankful.

A man decides early in life, whether to align himself with truth, or to align himself with power. The two are often, but not always, in opposition to each other.

Alt-Right writers have opted for the former. Establishment writers, mainly for the latter. Power wins in the short-term, sometimes spectacularly. But in the long term, truth--and directly or indirectly those aligned with it--always wins

High IQ individuals learn how to write essays in spite of their teachers (since there are such things as books).

Only partially true. Assertive individuals learn inspite of their teachers and culture. I've known many, many intelligent individuals that couldn't write an essay to save their lives, and some less than intelligent ones that could be and were taught the formula to make the cut in the professional world.

Your parents socioeconomic success is generally indicative of their IQ, which acts as an anchor on regression to the mean. Parents are also mostly responsible for instill you with social skills and work ethic, which are solid plus factors.

I would say that the culture and parental influence on 1st and 2nd generation Asians have just as much, if not more influence in academic success than being actually Asian.

I wouldn't. I knew a bunch of slacker NE Asians with B+ averages that ended up with 1350+ SAT scores which was right around with all their straight A peers. I was like that too. I kind of got the sense that the try-hard Asians resented the fact that they weren't significantly higher than their peers.

The University of Delware paper cited by Fred Reed in his post about Ferguson has a chart at its very end that merits the "worth a thousand words" statement in spades.

Everyone was okay with trying to square the circle of stupid people's school performance while social mood was maniacally high and resources seemed to grow on the Federal Reserve's trees. Sooner or later this fantasy will dispel, and sobriety will bring with it RAGE.

Wait until parents of "average and above average" kids wake up to recognize just how badly schools have robbed their kids in favor of the Impossible task of making IQ 70-90 kids "average."

You all likely underestimate just how badly this is being done right now.

I didn't read anything that says that an hispanic person was more likely to get bad grades than a white person of the same wealth level, which is what you would have to do for the test to say what you are claiming.

Assertive individuals learn in spite of their teachers and culture. I've known many, many intelligent individuals that couldn't write an essay to save their lives, and some less than intelligent ones that could be and were taught the formula to make the cut in the professional world.

Sigh. Exceptions are nice, but when we talk about attributes like IQ we're talking about general trends, not individuals. In general, an "assertive" high-IQ person will be better at writing essays than an assertive low-IQ person, and even most non-assertive high-IQ people will be able to manage it well enough when necessary, with or without the help of a teacher. Many low-IQ people will never be good at it no matter how assertive they are or how dedicated their teachers, and the non-assertive low-IQ people will be hopeless at it.

Maybe that's not nice, maybe that's not fair, but that's how it is. And raising objections like "What about culture?" "What about poverty?" just reveals one's ignorance of the topic. Scientists didn't just start figuring out IQ yesterday; they've been working on it for decades, and have worked hard to isolate it from other factors as a matter of course. In fact, because no one likes the implications, great effort has been put into finding other factors that might trump IQ or offer ways to alleviate its effects -- far more so than has been done in, say, climate science or nutrition. So yes, the obvious alternative explanations that come quickly to mind have been tested, many many times.

Gara, I'm guessing they were using a statistical method known as Analysis of variance, ANOVA for short. It's a t-test for cases where you have multiple depended & independent variables. There's an open source statistical package called R ( http://www.r-project.org) that is used by cancer research facilities and is free. This may be what you're looking for.

"IQ didn't change from the mid 1950's to today, but virtues have been lost. Dumbing down is one vice that encourages the rest." @ Sarcophilus

I suspect you are wrong about that.

Between the effects of birth control and abortion, (not to mention immigration) wouldn't it be reasonable to assume the average IQ now is lower than in 1950?

What evidence exists showing an average IQ of today as being the same as the average IQ of 1950?

I'm not trying to be nitpicky here. I realize there are many variables, especially with changing demographics. But, just sticking to the typical white person, why would it make sense to assume he has the same IQ as the average white person of 1950?

To me, grades is a higher predictor of success because it predicts the motivation of the person pursuing the grades. So grades must be taken into account with IQ and preference for certain subjects. This way we won't steer people to the wrong profession and the wrong schools. There are too many people not working in the areas of where they went to school. Plus, too many don't graduate at all.

My state school often believed in a well rounded education. This means an excessive amount of useless liberal arts elective courses, which can be one-third of required classes. So much of education is a bunch of crap about social justices as if we can train people to care. Schools should mainly try to graduate students that they accepted, but they seem to make that as difficult as ever.

No matter how much we complain about schools, they tighten requirements so much that it is different than 30 years ago when I went.

"The Flynn effect is the substantial and long-sustained increase in both fluid and crystallized intelligence test scores measured in many parts of the world from roughly 1930 to the present day."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

What part of " We did not record race, religion, national origin, or socio-economic status." escaped you, Gara?

What I didn't quite get is, if they did not record race, how do they later came to the prediction that whites do better than blacks? Wouldn't they also predict that wealthy people did better than poor people?

I said nothing about exceptions. My professional experience speaks to different trends.

In general, an "assertive" high-IQ person will be better at writing essays than an assertive low-IQ person

My experience has been that intelligence doesn't matter for writing. All that matters is whether or not they can figure out that the formula is simple, but the pieces shift in a way that isn't necessarily rule bound. A certain type of creativity, if you consider that separate, has been what I look for to determine if someone could do the job I needed done. In fact, in one environment, I found that below-average-intelligence males could excel because they understood that the rules to writing change based on the data being collected. It didn't matter what their teachers had taught them or how well they did on a test. They discarded this knowledge to get the job done.

Maybe that's not nice, maybe that's not fair, but that's how it is.

You believe I care about fairness or "nice?" Listening to someone tell me about their college grades and IQ scores is irrelevant to me in a professional setting. Some of them have difficulty understanding that I'll have to fire them despite their intelligence. Intelligence, like resumes, are largely irrelevant.

And raising objections like "What about culture?" "What about poverty?" just reveals one's ignorance of the topic. Scientists didn't just start figuring out IQ yesterday

I didn't say IQ was nothing. It is an accomplishment, one shaped by genetics and culture. To pretend culture has nothing to do with it is to ignore the fact that language, test-taking skills, reading, and respect for authority are all culturally taught, if still intuitively learned.

What I didn't quite get is, if they did not record race, how do they later came to the prediction that whites do better than blacks? Wouldn't they also predict that wealthy people did better than poor people?

Collecting the initial data, they didn't record those items, to get their formula. When the formula was applied to the incoming freshmen it WAS recorded, and that's how that determination was made.

Gara What I didn't quite get is, if they did not record race, how do they later came to the prediction that whites do better than blacks?

Having done research, I can tell you. To get their specific grades they had to have their specific identity noted somewhere in their databases. So no matter how much the researchers try to keep the name separate from the end results, someone determined to link name and results can do so if they a have access to the raw data. It could have taken running a comparison with the university's own grades and classes database versus the programs data, or many other methods. But someone determined to make the connection will find a way, because one exists, no matter how much you try to obscure it.

He concludes that in Europe, adults in Germany and the Netherlands have the highest average IQ at 107, compared with 100 across Britain. The UK is also beaten by Poland (106), Sweden (104), Italy (102), Austria (101) and Switzerland (101).

Adults in England and Wales have an IQ of 100.5, ahead of Ireland and Scotland, both with 97. Residents of London and the South East average 102.

I wonder how badly French (and to a lesser extent Belgian) IQ has been damaged by its miscegenation problem; they seem to be the worst in Europe when it comes to mixing with groids, and neither France nor Belgium are constitutionally allowed to collect statistics on race or ethnicity.

I doubt that Serbian IQ is similar to Latin American IQ, given that it produced Nikola Tesla, while Latin America has produced... whom? Incidentally, Serbs make fun of Bosniaks for being stupid.

I do find Italian IQ believable. It seems considerably more cultured than Spain. Also, keep in mind that Italy is two different countries, basically, a Germany (North Italy) tied to a Mexico (South Italy).

What I didn't quite get is, if they did not record race, how do they later came to the prediction that whites do better than blacks?

They came up with a test/questionnaire which asked about a whole bunch of things not including race, but did predict well how students would do in various courses. Then, after they'd been using it for a while, people started to notice that it predicted more success for whites (and Asians, presumably) than for blacks. It wouldn't take long for a counselor to think, "Hmm, I've got all these white and Asian kids coming in with test results saying they'll do well in a variety of tough fields; but most of the black kids have results saying their best bet of graduating will be in Education or something soft, and they'll have to work hard to maintain a C. Racism! I must report this to my local race-bothering authorities!"

It's like what happened with firefighter tests. Firefighters were predominately white, so people said that must be due to nepotism and racism. So they started using written tests of firefighting knowledge, figuring that would give everyone an equal chance. Oops, blacks failed the tests at far higher rates than whites, so then they sued the cities for disparate impact. The cities had to abandon the tests entirely, or make them so easy that pretty much everyone could pass them and then hire by quota from there.

"What are the chances you learn how to write an essay if your teacher sucks or assumes it's not important for you to learn?"Abe Lincoln and the one room schoolhouse say hi.

"do you know if they separated race from socio economic status?"The average SAT score for blacks from families that earn > $200,000/year or more is 981, the only white group they beat is those from families earning less than $20,000/year with a score of 978.Those are the highest and lowest categories. This is actually cited as racism by the Journal of Blacks in Higher Edu

"And of course there is a correlation between wealth and IQ."Back when I believed in equality I tried to explain to a black its better to hold off on a weekend vacation instead of trying to get a payday loan with an APR of over 500%. I was not smart enough to succeed at convincing him.

"So which is worse for America, an elite of high-IQ Asians or Jews?"Have you ever heard of East Asians being kicked out of over 100 nations? The Jewish Bolsheviks killed more white Ukraine/Russian Christians than Mao did his own people.

When the formula was applied to the incoming freshmen it WAS recorded, and that's how that determination was made.

So was economic status also recorded for the incoming freshmen, as to separate the two variables (race vs wealth)

My point is, if we look at students within the same socio economic status, do the racial differences remain? Do wealthy blacks and latinos do worse academically than equally wealthy whites? The link doesn't say it explicitely. And we can't look at the original data since it doesn't even seem to be published.

It would be very easy to make a large sample study about IQ differences among people with different races and same socio-economic status. (does that even exist?) Is just that the politically incorrect nature of the study would make it difficult for a universityor institution to provide the funds for it, and the scientist who defended the thesis of a certain race being intellectually inferior would get fingers pointed at him for racism with predictable consequences for his carreer. This is one of the few cases where right wingers have a good point about liberal bias in academia getting on the way of scientific research.

"Hmm, I've got all these white and Asian kids coming in with test results saying they'll do well in a variety of tough fields; but most of the black kids have results saying their best bet of graduating will be in Education or something soft, and they'll have to work hard to maintain a C. Racism! I must report this to my local race-bothering authorities!"

I don't dispute this. What I wonder is if those black kids got those results because they are poor or because they are black. Thats the million dollar question.

"Aren't like 1/3rd of white male engineers married to Asian women? Seems more like a hands on approach to me. Cream off the high IQ males, leave the rest to rot. Insidious really."

China's 1 child policy has resulted in killing off lots of girls to the point that only successful productive Chinese have a chance to breed. This is a form of eugenics. If there is 100 men and 40 women the stupidest men don't have much chance of breeding outside of rape.

Sigh again. No one's saying that, but if someone didn't pull out that straw man, it just wouldn't seem like an IQ discussion; so thanks, I guess.

My experience has been that intelligence doesn't matter for writing.

That's nonsense. Yes, other factors are important: creativity, ambition, culture, etc. I wouldn't try to calculate exactly how much each of those contributes, or put them in order of importance. But to say that intelligence doesn't matter at all is ridiculous, and makes you sound like you spend all your time with above-average IQ people. Nice work if you can get it, but there's another half of the population out there.

That's not saying smarter = better writer. It's saying intelligence helps with most tasks -- especially mental ones like writing -- and there's probably a threshold below which a task becomes very difficult, if not impossible. Try to teach grammar to an 80-IQ kid sometime, and then tell me it doesn't matter. You're not actually doing him a favor if you tell him his struggles just mean he's not assertive enough.

Unfortunately, a full plate of work is going to tear me away from this conversation for too long. I'll give your last comment another read though so that I can think about it for the future. As I've found with many of your comments, you have some points worth considering further.

I don't dispute this. What I wonder is if those black kids got those results because they are poor or because they are black. That's the million dollar question.

And it's been studied and answered many times. Poor white kids score as well or better on IQ and academic tests than rich black kids. But if you can get a valid study to say otherwise, it'll be worth a lot more than a million, so go for it.

Sun Xhu - Not incorrect, just a different method than yours, and no way of knowing which was used. But having done years of research I can tell you that if a specific way to identify a subject exists in your research, someone can ferret it out no matter how much you want to hide it.

It's just that so much research is biased towards a specific (generally leftist) conclusion. Thus few attempts to discredit it by digging through the data actually occur, like it did in this program.

IQ matters for everything, even common sense. My guess is if you have a high IQ and you do any amount of reading at all, you're probably a semi expert in several areas you aren't credentialed in. I never do estate work, i never studied it and it bores me to death, but I regularly have to confront the best estate attorneys for screwing up an estate plan. Which goes over like a ton of lead bricks.

NorthernHamlet, thanks. By the way, I don't mean to pick on you personally; you seem like a reasonable sort. I just get frustrated because it seems like it's impossible to have a conversation about IQ without getting diverted into the same old objections about culture and wealth and so on which were settled long ago by the science. I shouldn't be surprised that so many people are unaware of knowledge that has been as reliably hidden as this stuff.

Also, kind of off topic, doesn anyone know of a programm that can do this:

This whole thing then went into a huge program to find the correlation of each item in the predictors with each item in the results. This would be a number from 0 to 0.99

I could really use something like this for a work thing right now. Would be very thankful.

R is good and free and will do that for you--the aformentioned ANOVA, as well as various kinds of regression analysis, correlation, etc. etc. R Studio and R Commander use R as their back-end and give it something of a nicer GUI to work with; R itself is basically command-line and can be a little intimidating for a novice.

SAS is another option, but it is very not free and something you'd need to get your employer to purchase for you. IBM has SPSS, also not free. Minitab is another one, as is S/S+. Basically go look for "statistical software"; any package worth its salt will do what you're asking for as basic functionality.

"Aren't like 1/3rd of white male engineers married to Asian women? Seems more like a hands on approach to me. Cream off the high IQ males, leave the rest to rot. Insidious really."@Will BestAsian women may snag some high-IQ white Deltas, but I'm pretty sure that's because the women find them hawt compared to their own men, but they're not so hawt that they'll ignore them in favor of white women.

China's 1 child policy has resulted in killing off lots of girls to the point that only successful productive Chinese have a chance to breed. This is a form of eugenics. If there is 100 men and 40 women the stupidest men don't have much chance of breeding outside of rape.@AnubisNot sure if it's actually working out that way. DINK-ism is rampant in Chinese cities, and one-child is not rigorously enforced in poorer provinces.

I've known 2 women, both "of color" and both arrogantly "educated, who completely disbelieved in IQ or intelligence at all.

One argued that intelligence wasn't real because there might be poets who are very intelligent and good writers, yet who don't do good on tests. Before asking why she was allowed into a school in the first place, it's more concerning that she "studied" psychology and will be responsible for assessing the mental health of others.

Obviously conversing with someone like her with the intent of having a healthy discussion is futile, but I wanted to ask her why the psychologists of state agencies utilize IQ tests alongside other indicators to decide to assign social workers and mandated therapy to people with mental health issues? If IQ isn't real, then why do we all know when we meet someone with an IQ of 60, and why do we all regard that person as unfit to live on his own? Everyone knows what a retard is. Do they get high scores on these tests? Doubtful.

The other "person of color" was receiving a "PhD" in sociology. She thinks IQ tests don't predict, or in any way represent human intelligence or cognitive ability because racism. Just racism.

For those conflating economic differences with racial differences, one is not an reliable substitute for the other.

I know an anecdote does not a proof make, but I grew up in a seriously poor and seriously violent St. Louis suburb. It made Ferguson look like a wealthy cake walk.

Most of the educators were black as were most of the students. The school used student choice to get around anti-tracking laws. If you were a D student and wanted to take the A class so be it.

That said without exception, in my experience, 8 out of 10 of top students in all the classes, with the possible exception of PE and music were white, even though they only made up 5% of the population and 88% were black.

In spite of us all being equally poor and taught by the same teachers.

These observations are slightly interesting Vox. What "we" idiots want to know is epigenetic push factors.

Eg. Are you smart enough to read this: All dark skinned people have chronically lower levels of Vitamin D - except if they are getting it from fish/ cod liver oil etc. Vitamin D's roll in neural development is insufficiently explored.Someone on your blog mentioned organ transplant. Well it turns out a black skinned neighbor might be a better organ donor for you Vox than your white neighbour. Which suggests mere skin colour is doing a lot less than you believe it is.And for all the white genii in America why did global warming, false flags, feminism, and cultural relativism, family law courts, fractional reserve banking, just root your economies.

So we, the idiots, will go on saying genetic differences are trivial. Until come up with some decent arguments that is.

Ps. I can get a Cello made in China delivered to Australia for about half the price I can get a single neck tie delivered from England. Insane. Intelligence has very little to do with who is winning and who is losing.

Eg. Are you smart enough to read this: All dark skinned people have chronically lower levels of Vitamin D - except if they are getting it from fish/ cod liver oil etc. Vitamin D's roll in neural development is insufficiently explored.

Skin color and IQ have no correlation. If that were true, we wouldn't be able to explain how African albinos are no smarter than their normal cousins, or why Sri Lankans and South Indians behave much more like Europeans than like Africans.

Someone on your blog mentioned organ transplant. Well it turns out a black skinned neighbor might be a better organ donor for you Vox than your white neighbour. Which suggests mere skin colour is doing a lot less than you believe it is.

(heh) Source?

And for all the white genii in America why did global warming, false flags, feminism, and cultural relativism, family law courts, fractional reserve banking, just root your economies.

Evil elites got it going, and indoctrinated the vast majority of apathetic sheeple who don't think about this kind of thing. Your IQ is irrelevant if you don't use it, and most sheeple don't think about the Big Picture.

And besides, blacks are far worse when it comes to stupidity like cultural Marxism than whites ever have been.

I wonder how badly French (and to a lesser extent Belgian) IQ has been damaged by its miscegenation problem; they seem to be the worst in Europe when it comes to mixing with groids, and neither France nor Belgium are constitutionally allowed to collect statistics on race or ethnicity.

I think the pct of Nordic vs. Celt blood is a bigger factor. Saxons, Danes and Rus are 100-105 average IQ while Celts are 95-100. Slavs and Turks 90-95, Semitcs 85-90 and Dot Indians 80-85*. Can't quite figure out where Franks land. Several generations living at the crossroads of several gene pools kind of confuses the issue.

Most miscegenation (remember, most != all) isn't average mating with average, it's the lower half of one gene pool mating with the upper half of the other.

* All numbers extrememly rough estimates based on attempting to correlate estimated national ethnic compositions with IQ scores. The data is spotty, so feel free to dispute any conclusions.

I suspect that time-preference and risk tolerance are two other big genetic traits with an impact on success, and casting a gimlet eye at history, it certainly seems like Aisians have different profiles there than do Europeans.

I think the pct of Nordic vs. Celt blood is a bigger factor. Saxons, Danes and Rus are 100-105 average IQ while Celts are 95-100. Slavs and Turks 90-95, Semitcs 85-90 and Dot Indians 80-85*. Can't quite figure out where Franks land. Several generations living at the crossroads of several gene pools kind of confuses the issue.

Possibly, but it wouldn't really explain why France is below Ireland and Scotland instead of between them and the Germanic countries. The original Franks came from the Netherlands, IIRC, and Norman, of course, is a corruption of the Scandinavian term for "Norwegian".

Possibly, but it wouldn't really explain why France is below Ireland and Scotland instead of between them and the Germanic countries. The original Franks came from the Netherlands, IIRC, and Norman, of course, is a corruption of the Scandinavian term for "Norwegian".

Certainly, but Ireland has lots of Danes (e.g. Vikings) in their historical gene pool. Dublin wasn't founded by Celts. The Franks are indeed germanic (Rhine valley). Charlemange was King of the Franks and it was his empire splitting up that created the West Franks and the East Franks. East Franks are now called Germans. But both nations absorbed other tribes, iI's all imprecise*. I gave up trying to estimate Hellenic/Latin IQ entirely based on available data. Where can you find a gene pool of ancient Romans these days? Northern Italy was overrun by the Lombards (germanic, originally from Scandinavia) and southern Italy (and Sicily) was conquered by a bunch of Normans who must've decided the English climate was too dreary. How much turkic blood is present in modern Greece after centuries of Ottoman rule?

* Prussians are half-slavic, the Scots are from Ireland, any navigable river in western Europe might have a good chunk of viking blood, any place you could gallop a horse through eastern Europe probalby has lots of Atillla-spawn...

Hunh!? You get vitamin D from the sun. So dark skinned people being dark from being in the sun should have more.

Melanin is built-in sunscreen, great UV protection. Dark skin produces less vitamin D for the same amount of sunshine, but is also less prone to skin damage from sun exposure. Dark-skinned people living in - say - Minnesota, or Seattle - are at risk of vitiamin D deficiency because their skin is adapted for parts of the globe with more intense insolation. Likewise, light-skinned people are at greater risk of sunburn and skin cancer in the tropics because their skin in adapted for climates with less sunshine.

<I How much turkic blood is present in modern Greece after centuries of Ottoman rule? </I

Its easy to overstate such things. "Rule" usually meant an occupier's razor-thin administrative class oversaw a ruled state, but there was very little in the way of population replacement or transfers. Also, historically people mixed very little across language and religious groups -- especially non-cosmopolitans with the higher TFRs.

Also, kind of off topic, doesn anyone know of a programm that can do this:

This whole thing then went into a huge program to find the correlation of each item in the predictors with each item in the results. This would be a number from 0 to 0.99

I could really use something like this for a work thing right now. Would be very thankful.

RapidMiner has a nice GUI but a relatively steep learning curve. It can access your data from pretty much any source, transform it, and perform damn near any statistical analysis. A community package (RapidMiner 5.3) is free. I have used it for textual analysis as well as financial modeling.

Cee December 07, 2014 3:52 PMAlso, kind of off topic, doesn anyone know of a programm that can do this:

This whole thing then went into a huge program to find the correlation of each item in the predictors with each item in the results. This would be a number from 0 to 0.99

I could really use something like this for a work thing right now. Would be very thankful.

R is good and free and will do that for you--the aformentioned ANOVA, as well as various kinds of regression analysis, correlation, etc. etc. R Studio and R Commander use R as their back-end and give it something of a nicer GUI to work with; R itself is basically command-line and can be a little intimidating for a novice.

There is also a plugin to turn R into a stored procedure language within a PostgreSQL database (an excellent open-source database solution). That rounds out the package nicely by allowing you to manage data and run statistics all in one place.

I've known 2 women, both "of color" and both arrogantly "educated, who completely disbelieved in IQ or intelligence at all. One argued that intelligence wasn't real because there might be poets who are very intelligent and good writers, yet who don't do good on tests.

This is odd. In 2002 the US Supreme Court (Atkins v. Virginia) said that executing a murderer with low IQ is tantamount to punishing a dumb animal:

"Mentally retarded [i.e. low IQ] persons frequently know the difference between right and wrong and are competent to stand trial, but, by definition, they have diminished capacities to understand and process information, to communicate, to abstract from mistakes and learn from experience, to engage in logical reasoning, to control impulses, and to understand others' reactions. Their deficiencies do not warrant an exemption from criminal sanctions, but diminish their personal culpability."

Maybe your colored girl friends think we should go back to firing up Ol' Sparky for dumb Negro murderers because there ain't no such thing as "intelligence". We sure could do it. It'd save us a bunch of money feeding and clothing them in prison for life, sho' nuff.

> ...how do they later came to the prediction that whites do better than blacks?

As others have already noted, they didn't. Someone else did. " There was no single item in any test that identified the race of the student, but those who set out to prove this thesis managed to find that out."

"IQ matters.""No it doesn't! IQ doesn't affect anything, and besides it doesn't exist anyway. Also I have this book on EQ that you should read.""Yes, IQ does matter. Here is a big pile of evidence showing that it correlates with success in a variety of ways.""IQ isn't everything! I know this one guy...."

Although I'm well over on the "IQ matters" side, I've never heard anyone claim IQ is everything. I'm not sure I've heard anyone claim it accounts for more than 50% of one's results in life. Higher than that for certain things like SAT/ACT testing, but lower for some other things. So even "extreme" HBDers generally suggest a 50/50 mix of nature and nurture at most.

This is odd. In 2002 the US Supreme Court (Atkins v. Virginia) said that executing a murderer with low IQ is tantamount to punishing a dumb animal

A smart animal, but an animal nonetheless

Asian women may snag some high-IQ white Deltas, but I'm pretty sure that's because the women find them hawt compared to their own men, but they're not so hawt that they'll ignore them in favor of white women.

I don't think it is some nefarious plot to breed the intelligence out of the white race. I do suspect that Asian women put more weight on raw intelligence than their white sisters. Which would result in greater matches with high IQ white deltas, who are largely ignored by attractive white women until their late 20s.

I recall Jerry talking about the grade prediction program in one of his anthologies. IIRC, he said that the program was discontinued because there were several programs for which there were no predicted failures. This was back in the 50s and there weren't many black or Latino kids in Washington at the time. I lived in Albany, Oregon from '61-'65 and the only black people I saw were people that had been stationed with my father, and went to church with us, in Germany that had come up from Kalifornia to visit us. The only Latinos I saw were migrant farm workers. Traveling to visit an uncle employed by Boeing at the time, Seattle, Washington looked as lily white as central Oregon.

It's entirely possible that they tried the program again later, and it got shot down again after the racial mix chanced.

Its easy to overstate such things. "Rule" usually meant an occupier's razor-thin administrative class oversaw a ruled state, but there was very little in the way of population replacement or transfers. Also, historically people mixed very little across language and religious groups -- especially non-cosmopolitans with the higher TFRs.

The Ottomans did a fair amount of shuffling people around. Well, so did Byzantium, and the Huns, and the Magyars...

VD says "A metric's failure to be absolutely perfect in every regard does not render it useless." .. an excellent thought than can be applied to all sort of arguments. A theory/model can be generally correct and specifically wrong and still be valid. These sorts of analysis can produce results that a generally speaking correct yet there are always examples of specific individuals whom do not fit the model.. this is the very nature of stochastic models... and almost all real life models are stochastic.

VD says "...you are still trying to claim that whites are intellectually identical to Asians are intellectually the same as Africans ..." Ah... the myth of the super Asian .. I often wonder where that comes from as in 25+ years of high tech life I have yet to meet this Asian myth.. It shows another problem with not just IQ testing but all testing... you have to make sure that the group you are testing represents the entire population if you what to draw conclusions about the whole population from that data set... When we talk about mythic hi IQ Asians .. these are the cream of the crop of the Asian world... you forget that there are 4 billion Asians, you test the IQ of a few thousand Asians either living in the US going to Cal tech or MIT or at the Chinese equivalent and then proclaim them geniuses... This is why the greatest inventions/innovations of the 20th century originate in the West.

I read an interesting blurb about math and special ability, Neanderthal DNA, hybridization, and race a little while back. Conventional wisdom in biology is that human direct ancestors and Neanderthals separated about 600k-700k years ago. It was *suspected* that they may have interbred much more recently, perhaps 30k-40k years ago. Recent detailed genetic work indicates with a high degree of certainty that they DID.

Some of the genes associated with human/Neanderthal cross-breeding are specifically correlated with mathematical and special reasoning in modern humans. These genes do not show up in African populations, because their ancestors did not pass through the Eurasian region where the Neanderthals lived. Also, as one study put it, "Neanderthal DNA is conspicuously low in regions of the X chromosome and testes-specific genes."

It's one interesting explanation of the difference in academic ability between the populations. Fk'n Neanderthals.

Have to agree with clk. Been in High tech since the 1980s, first hardware design in a product before I had graduated with a BSEE, and I have not seen the magic high tech Asians. yes in the US of A we have a lot of intelligent ones and they are also present in the industrial enterprises located all over Asia. But the reality is they seem to be much better at abstract thinking than that somewhat unpredictable skill for making a new design from nothing but an idea. I have seen the Japs do it, but the Chinese stock...not so much. That said when you get to abstract papers they are very good and I would nto be surprised to see them come to dominate high level abstract thinking. But making something practical, that still seems to lie in the realm of the northern European minds and ...The Jews. I have seen many fine Jewish engineers who really have the spark of creativity.

Now all the above is related to hardware. In software I am not sure that applies. I see a lot of Indians who seem to be very good, though I do not have the data to see if they fill the most creative slots or are just decent coders who work cheap as H1B visa holders.

Now all the above is related to hardware. In software I am not sure that applies. I see a lot of Indians who seem to be very good, though I do not have the data to see if they fill the most creative slots or are just decent coders who work cheap as H1B visa holders.

There are a billion dot Indians. With an average IQ of 80 to 85 and a 15 or 16 point STDDEV, there's still 60k+ with genius-level IQs. You're seeing those guys.

Unfortunately, I'm also starting to see the other 99.994% show up in oursourcing, and it ain't pretty. Every population has a Bell Curve.

Let's not pretend. They, the ones trying to implement these programs, know. They aren't trying to prove equality, they are attempting to diminish everybody to the lowest common denominator. Where from there depends on the schemer. And, really, they are more successful than not. Speak with an average highschooler. A major part of their problem, one they didn't account, is that as everybody approaches the lowest common denominator, that denominator bottoms out further. Not just not doing well, as is their only real ability, but they have stopped even trying. Rather than a bad grade, they quit school. Rather than just quitting school, they get into drugs and crime. They are chasing the losers, but the losers prefer their placement so run deeper into the shallow pool. Even they know, somehow, that equality is more of a trap than a promise, or even a hope. They know what they are, refuse to allow other attempts at making them more than that.

On the good side, as with economic realities, eventually this stuff naturally sorts itself out. Blacks are beginning to segregate. It won't stop with them. And it will be preferred by all. A few politicians have gone down, a few more will have to. Time is ticking away at a whirlwind pace. I have popcorn, and more.

Yes, all not all bell curves are created equal. My theory is that it takes two things (where intelligence is concerned; I think type of religion is also critical) to build and maintain a civilization: a decent average IQ, giving you a mass of people capable of holding down jobs, caring for their families, and supporting their communities; and a certain percentage of geniuses to develop new ideas and technology.

So in theory, a group could have an average IQ of 105 but have low variation, meaning it would have very few geniuses (or retards). Such a society might be orderly and comfortable, reliably maintaining the basics of civilization; but also stagnant, going for centuries without much noticeable advance. A society with an average of 95 and wide variation would have more geniuses to come up with new civilizational advances, but it would also have more problems with crime and supporting a growing mass of unemployable people.

That's why it's so frustrating that we can't talk about IQ. It's not just a boutique topic for smart people to argue about, because it affects policy. We have millions of people in the IQ 70-95 range, and we're exporting the jobs they're capable of doing or filling them with cheap immigrants, while pretending it doesn't matter because IQ doesn't exist -- they just need to work harder and get degrees! We're consigning millions of fellow citizens -- and yes, there are many whites in that range, so this isn't a race thing -- to unemployment and poverty, so we can maintain our happy illusions about "you can do anything you put your mind to", and so that consumers can shop slightly cheaper and industrialists can make loads more money.

Over 80% these comments are ignorant or stupid; even the ones that are broadly on the right side often have serious errors.

If you don't usually score in the top 10% of the general population on standardized tests and have not thoroughly read and understood Herrnstein and Murray's "The Bell Curve", then expressing your opinions on the subject of IQ is a waste of everyone's time.

IQ is an objective measure of the relative intelligence of groups. IQ tests may sometimes give lower scores to individuals than their usual real performance, but seldom overestimates. IQ is only a linear measure of intelligence near the mean, at the tails a wide range of abilities are compressed into a small range of scores; IQ is technically a measure of rarity of intelligence relative to a standard population rather than a direct measure of intelligence. Direct, absolute measures of intelligence are possible based on the same questions used to calculate an IQ (e.g. Stanford Binet CSS scores), and they reveal that the true gap between very high IQ adults and average adults is greater than that between average adults and preschoolers.

IQ is the best single predictor of nearly all positive outcomes, including school performance and job performance regardless of the level of skill required in the job. (Far, far better than resume, school transcripts, interests, experience, interviews or anything else other than an actual work sample / job tryout.) Only conscientiousness tests add much to the predictiveness of IQ. IQ predicts performance well for all races; in fact, Black performance is even a bit lower than would be predicted from their already low IQ scores.

IQ is at least 70% genetic; essentially none of the remainder is due to controllable variations in environment but rather to idiosyncratic and random factors. Only in the very worst environments affect IQ substantially - long-term malnutrition or complete lack of verbal exposure, for instance. Contrary to intuition, the heritability of IQ increases with the age of the individual, with environment making some difference at very young ages, but the effects of early environmental interventions disappear by adulthood.

Not only do the average IQs of different groups differ, do the sizes of the population standard deviations, which can have extreme effects. For instance, despite the math GRE being a low-ceiling test on which many people get perfect scores, the average Asian male scores at the 98th percentile of the Black female distribution, while the average Black female scores at the 2nd percentile of the Asian male distribution.

There is no threshold above which further increases in IQ do not increase performance in complex jobs such as in science or medicine, but there are thresholds below which good performance is very unlikely even for ordinary jobs. About IQ 108 is the minimum for middle-class professional and managerial jobs.

Higher IQ will not help you if you don't actually use it. In particular, if intelligence isn't applied to questioning beliefs, assumptions and wishful conjectures, ones conclusions may be no better than those made by a less intelligent but more self-critical mind.

So in theory, a group could have an average IQ of 105 but have low variation, meaning it would have very few geniuses (or retards).

Yes, that thought was in the back of my head writing about STDEV in Indian populations. 15 or 16 is generally considered to be the number for humanity, but there's no reason to believe it can't be different for different populations. In fact, we know that's the case for at least one difference - that between men and women. Men's IQ shows a greaters STDEV than womens, so why couldn't Danes have a higher STDEV than Indians?

IQ is at least 70% genetic; essentially none of the remainder is due to controllable variations in environment but rather to idiosyncratic and random factors.

Considering that in a complex biological system, there are far more ways to screw something up than to make it better, my assumption is that genetics are primarily responsible for the maximum potential IQ, and that environment determines how close to that potiential someone gets. A person with great genetic potnetial raised in a mal-nourished hell-hole is more likely to be of average IQ than a person with average potential raised in a palace.

Whether genetics is 50% or 70% or 90%, I can't say. I doesn't have to matter of course - if we're willing to let people make their own judgements about individuals, it'll sort itself all out. The problem is we have liberal midwits insisting we ignore individual differences, which forces us to consider group differences.

Argh, proofreading fail. A person with great genetic potnetial raised in a mal-nourished hell-hole is more likely to be of average IQ than a person with average potential raised in a palace is to be of exceptional IQ.

Regarding the discussion of high-income Blacks who score lower on the SAT/IQ tests than low income whites, you may be interested in reading Rushton's short book entitled "Race, Evolution, and Behavior". He makes the claim that children of each racial group regress to the mean of their race. In other words, the child of a white +3 SD IQ executive earning 200k per year would on average regress to the racial mean of 100 IQ. However, the children of a black executive with the same socioeconomic status and IQ would regress to the black racial mean 87 IQ (-1.9 SD).

Regression to the mean is a statistical illusion. It works both ways - your parents are likely to be closer to the mean than you, as are your children. In fact, your own high score on one test is likely to be followed and preceded by lower scores on other tests. The effect comes from the fact that tests correlate imperfectly - 0.6 - 0.8 for major IQ tests and IQ proxies. There is no magnetic attraction to a population mean.

Also, the IQ standard deviation is 15 or occasionally 16 points, so 87 IQ is about 1 standard deviation below the average. Other sources generally put the Black - White gap at 1 s.d., but the largest studies such an the New York Longitudinal Study of Youth often get numbers closer to 1.2 s.d. Over hundreds of studies, hardly any have been outside 0.8 to 1.5 s.d.

Since I am apparently one of those self deceived idiots, allow me to say that the predictive ability of people who do well on one kind of intellectual test to do well on another kind of intellectual test is not science. It is not the empirical measurement of an observable reality.

I could with even greater accuracy predict that the winners of beauty pageants will be shapely women who are in favor of world peace.

I can also predict she will wear a crown and carry a bouquet.

No matter how accurate such a prediction, it is not science. Beauty is not a thing that can be measured and neither is the degree of craving for world peace.

It is (at best) confirming a correlation. This is not the same as Newton determining the laws of gravity from which accurate descriptions of falling apples and orbiting planets can be deduced mathematically.

Regression to the mean is a statistical illusion. It works both ways - your parents are likely to be closer to the mean than you, as are your children. In fact, your own high score on one test is likely to be followed and preceded by lower scores on other tests. The effect comes from the fact that tests correlate imperfectly - 0.6 - 0.8 for major IQ tests and IQ proxies. There is no magnetic attraction to a population mean.

I understand that it is a statistical phenomenon, not a biological phenomenon, but that is not the same thing as an illusion. The point is simply that if we take 1000 white fathers with average IQs of 130 and they beget 2000 children with average IQs of 120, a population of 1000 black fathers with 130 IQs will beget a population of children about a standard deviation lower. If the observed numbers back that up then it doesn't matter what you believe about magnetic attractions. Feel free to dig in and disprove it.

AT, you are right so long as the 130 IQ Blacks and Whites are otherwise representative of their populations. If, however, parents in both groups were selected not only for having 130+ IQs but for themselves having parents with similar IQs, then the differences between the means of the two groups' children would be much less, they would revert to their families' means rather than those of their respective wider populations.

See: http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/06/07/the-breeders-equation/

Post a Comment

Rules of the blogPlease do not comment as "Anonymous". Comments by "Anonymous" will be spammed.